This is Part 3 of WGLT’s weeklong series The Next Shift about workforce issues in McLean County. Coming Thursday: What supports exist — and which don't — for those looking to start a business in McLean County.
Melody Troehler feels lucky.
She and her family treasure living in the Bloomington-Normal area, much more than she anticipated when they moved to the area in 2017.
"I will sing the praises of Bloomington — which is crazy," Troehler said. "I couldn't image being anywhere else."
She also enjoys her work, in which she does talent acquisition across the globe for a large investment bank. While she enoys life in Bloomington, employment options can be limited, depending on a person's industry or career choice.
A fully remote opportunity allowed her to bridge the gap between where she lives and what she does for work.
"When it comes to open positions, when you compare it to Chicago or St. Louis, there's just not as much opportunity here at all, especially when you get into those more experienced career roles," Troehler said. "It's very fortunate that companies will offer remote work so you can live in places like this, but also work with people across the globe."
But because the job is fully remote, Troehler said she has started to worry about its longevity.
Dialogue about working remotely has varied widely since the pandemic forced many workers home in 2020 and into 2021, with recent discourse surrounding corporations' pushes to get workers back into the office full time.
Nationally, larger companies with employees who could work remotely have pulled them back into the office, including Google, Meta, Salesforce, and video conferencing company Zoom, whose product usage surged during the COVID-era remote work period.
"CEOs are doing a hard pivot where they want people back in the office. We have seen a very hard shift (from) companies going 100% remote to, 'You can work from home a couple of days a week,' (to), 'We think it's really, really important that you're in the office networking, present, where we can put eyes on you,'" Troehler said.
A recent study from Stanford University's Institute for Economic Research (SIEPR) suggests while fully remote work will continue to decline from its high numbers during the pandemic's early years, hybrid work may actually become more common.
By the numbers
Some of Bloomington-Normal's largest employers have kept the hybrid work model going post-pandemic, if they weren't already offering something similar before.
Bloomington-based State Farm reports about 60% of its workforce are in hybrid-eligible roles and the remaining, roughly 40% of other employees, are either fully onsite or fully remote.
"I'll happily take a Chicago developer's salary down here in Bloomington-Normal just because I don't have to pay all of the additional charges of living in a major metropolitan area."Blake Sterzinger, Bloomington-based IT professional
"Our goal is to create an environment where our collective workforce can be its very best," the insurance giant said in a statement. "This is more than just where we work; it includes how we work and the skills and development our employees need to be their best."
A spokesperson for Country Financial said the percentage of its employees who are in hybrid-eligible roles is "nearly all" of its workforce, with those who are not in some sort of hybrid role comprising a "single digit percentage."
At Illinois State University, there are currently 450 employees with active remote work agreements. Those employees are either classified as civil service or administrative professionals, all of whom are eligible under university policy for remote work options if their job duties allow.
McLean County Chamber of Commerce CEO Charlie Moore said the organization recently conducted an employer needs survey exploring what member businesses were doing to recruit and retain employees, as well what was "top of mind or paramount for people for why they accepted a job or chose to leave a job."
"The top two are of no surprise: compensation and benefits," he said. "But the third one was work-life balance and remote work capabilities."
"The assumption based on talking to employers is that those who are finding ways to add additional opportunities to work from home — and/or create flexible work schedules — are probably the ones who are more aggressive in the recruitment and retention of people."
And so are the candidates who seek flexibility, according to Melody Troehler.
"Those days make a difference in terms of desirability for candidates because (they) really want to work from home," she said. "We're seeing candidates get picky and choosy: 'Well, this job is only two days a week (in-office), your job is three days a week — what can you do for me?'"
Authors of Stanford's SIEPR paper predict that, given the incremental but steady rise in hybrid working arrangements over the decades, "we could see 30-40% of working days being done from home.'"
'Going fully remote ... was a no-brainer'
While many employers and employees have pivoted to a hybrid model of work, there are fully remote holdouts.
People working in human resources, information technology, finance, payroll or call center sectors are the most likely type of employee to be fully remote, according to the Stanford SIEPR study.
Dave Christianer lives in Bloomington-Normal. He is a business analyst who works fully remotely — and he began working remotely in 2016, well before the pandemic forced others to do the same thing.
"I don't think I'll ever want to go back," he said of the proverbial office. "When I made the decision last year that I wanted a new job, that was top priority."
Christianer said his Connecticut-based company's CEO explored a "return to office" plan in 2022 and sent a survey out to its employees.
"They got like 95% of the employees back saying, 'No, we don't want to come back.' So they were like, well, we can't can't fight 95% of our entire workforce,'" he said.
For him, the opportunity to work completely from home offers a work-life balance that another job might not.
"If my wife was working a full-time schedule, if I was working a full-time schedule in-office, I don't know if our house would be clean," he said. "I don't know if I would have the energy to be social and go out, hang out with friends."
The pay was a perk, too — more than what other, local companies offered.
Blake Sterzinger, a Bloomington-based IT professional, found this out when he accepted a remote position last year. He hadn't specifically sought a remote job, but it was the one that offered him more money in the end.
"The more I looked around, the more I saw that remote employers were paying substantially more, like 40-60%, more than was being paid in the local market," he said.
"For me, going fully remote ... was a no brainer. I'll happily take a Chicago developer's salary down here in Bloomington-Normal just because I don't have to pay all of the additional charges of living in a major metropolitan area."
That's one reason why Melody Troehler hopes the companies that can offer remote work continue to do so, despite the push back she said she's recently seen.
"I hope employers continue to see that this could potentially be a great benefit when it comes to attracting talent to the workplace — not just as a way to get a lot of work done, but as a really great way to keep people in the communities that they love ... while being an amazing employee," she said.
